


volo contendere

by wordonawing



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, How is that not a tag, Modern Era, Rey Bonds With The Organa-Solos, Slow Burn, Soft Ben Solo, did not end well for him, i just realised how much this seems like a serial killer au and want to stress that it is Not, the general public and the US government are awful, the rating..... may change, the violence comes later and isn't very graphic but just in case, who made one mistake
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-17
Updated: 2018-08-29
Packaged: 2019-06-12 02:01:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15329223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordonawing/pseuds/wordonawing
Summary: “You ever think maybe you spend too much time with that guy?”“What, with Ben Solo?”“No, the other guy who’s on life without parole in the highest-security prison in the country. Yes, with Ben Solo.”





	1. eighteen (i)

**Author's Note:**

> sort of a what-if-the-force-existed-in-a-modern-au story, sort of a lawyers au, sort of messy. bear with

Rey meets Ben Solo when she’s eighteen, but it’s not like she doesn’t know who he is. Everybody does, even outside of their little town, which is the closest settlement to the holding facility by about fifty miles in every direction. There were huge debates over where to keep him, after it happened. Rey remembers sitting in front of the tiny TV in the home, bare toes scrunched up against the scratchy carpet, watching the news anchors talk back and forth and never listen to each other, it seemed to her. It must have been summer, because she remembers the back door blowing open in the breeze, the whine of mosquitoes in her ear underneath the word _abomination_. She liked the sound of it, the way the middle syllable seemed to settle in the middle of her mouth when she repeated it to herself. She had to look it up in the big dictionary at school, taking a few guesses before she got the spelling right. Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe they were saying some other word. She hopes they were, looking back on it, but she doubts it.

 

_**abomination** , n: something regarded with disgust or hatred; something abominable. _

 

According to Mr Merriam-Webster, anyway. Rey learns later, in Latin class (a rare exception to her knee-jerk rule of _don’t take it if it won’t help you get out of here_ , and one that will serve her well in her future career, though she’s unaware of that at the time, of course), that it comes from _abominatio_ , and, further back, _abominor_ , a deponent verb that means ‘to take as an ill omen’. Rey never does learn how to conjugate deponent verbs, and gets an A instead of an A+ in her final, but she remembers the derivation, how the people on TV had said it with their mouths twisting up, like it was lemon-sour on their tongues.

 

Okay, so. Maybe Rey doesn’t know who Ben Solo _is_ , not really. She doesn’t really know who anybody is, to be fair, least of all herself (she thinks this might be a common thing among eighteen-year-olds, but so far she hasn’t brought it up with her small circle of friends, some tiny, uralt part of her still convinced they’ll get bored of her soon, and deeply unwilling to bring that inevitability any closer). She’s known the basics since she was eight: a twelve-year-old boy, ears and nose too big for his face, standing in front of a building Rey doesn’t know yet is the Supreme Court. His mother is behind him to the right, his father on the left, and his hands, big like puppies’ paws are big, nails bitten down to the quick, are cuffed.

 

In all the avalanche of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, Rey somehow misses exactly why that’s the case, and has to ask the boy who sits next to her in homeroom. She expects him to tell her gleefully -- eight-year-olds take a certain amount of gusto in relating horrors, after all -- and is rattled when his voice is quiet, his tone measured, suddenly seeming very grown-up.

 

She understands his gravity, once he’s told her. There are some things that deserve respect, even at eight. What Ben Solo did (or didn’t do, depending on who you believe) is too big for them to understand, and maybe for him, too, if his expression as he’s led away from his parents is anything to go by. He doesn’t look angry, or sad. Just -- stunned. Like he can’t understand what’s happening to him, or doesn’t want to.

 

(Rey gets that, she thinks. It’s maybe why she keeps her hair in the same style as when she was first taken into the system, and why she burst into tears the day she realised the shape of her body was beginning to change. _How will they recognise me_ , she bawled at the adults trying to calm her down, and saw a look pass between them that she couldn’t parse, at the time. She thinks she might be able to now.)

 

Rey remembers all of this on the day she meets Ben Solo, in a great rush, because it’s been a few years since she last thought about him. You’d think it’d be hard to forget it, in Jakku, but for the most part folk just get on with their lives. Sometimes Rey will catch people stopped in the street, gazing up at the holding facility (not _prison_ , never _prison_ \-- bad PR, apparently) on the hill with a strange look in their eyes. But that’s the extent of its encroachment into daily life. Maz, her boss at the diner, says the media circus took a couple months to pack up and leave, but it did, and it hasn’t been back since. This is why, when the head janitor at the facility tells her how sorry he is to make her do this on her first day, Rey blinks at him in surprise, and then. Oh.

 

“It’s really no problem,” she says, without being totally aware of the words coming out of her mouth. “Just, you know. He’s not --? It’s not -- open, right?” She’d been about to ask if he was _loose_ , there, as if Ben Solo was some kind of animal that might chew through the bars of his cage. She really ought to pull herself together. She needs this job if she wants to keep the tiny apartment down by the river she moved into on her last birthday; she literally can’t afford to screw up on the first day.

 

The head janitor’s shaking his head. “No, no, you don’t need to worry about that. He’s cuffed all the time he’s in the cell, and there’ll be four feet of bullet-proof glass between you and him at all times. And the guards are posted on the walkway up above, so you’ll be safe as houses. As I say, I hate to do this to you on your first day, but the attendant who’s supposed to be on duty right now just called in sick.”

 

The head janitor seems like a genuinely nice man — he mentioned a daughter her age earlier, when Rey first arrived, and Rey has a feeling that when he looks at her he’s seeing his daughter first and her second, laid over Rey's shape like the tracings she used to make with greaseproof paper in the kitchen.

 

“He’s very docile,” says the janitor, still looking worried. Another word for animals. Rey remembers others from the newsreels: _rabid_. _Feral_. _Ought to be put down_. Maybe it’s that which makes up her mind for her; maybe it’s just that it’s summer and the itch of boredom under her skin demands to be scratched somehow. Might as well be this.

 

“It’s fine,” she says, already making a move to get up. “I can handle it.”

 

*

 

The head janitor’s briefing is thorough, too thorough for the simplicity of the task, and he accompanies her right up to the massive steel door that marks the outer part of the cell (the antechamber?), even though as far as she knows nobody else is kept in this facility. They pass staff members, some of whom Rey’s introduced to, some not. She supposes only the janitorial staff will be relevant to her. And the head of security. And the superintendent. All these people, just for one boy. Though he must be old enough to be called a man by now, she reasons; he's four years older than her, after all. She wonders, randomly, when his birthday is, and what happens on it. Do his parents visit? Do they bring a cake? Birthdays at the home were inevitably a sorry affair, the cake always lopsided, the presents always things you needed anyway, but the people that ran it did the best they could. And hey, at least Rey understands what Poe means when he complains about what the hell you’re supposed to do when people are singing the song at you.

 

“It doesn’t have to be anything other than straight in, straight out,” the head janitor said to her earlier, before they left his office. He’s more nervous than she is, but maybe that’s just because he knows what to expect and she doesn’t. She’s avoiding thinking too much about it, actually, keeping her distance from that part of her mind that always jumps straight to the worst possible outcome. “You can talk to him, if you want to, but you’re under no obligation to do that. And there’s four guards in the corridor, two in the antechamber, and you let them know if anything’s bothering you, okay? Anything at all, you let them know. Even if he looks at you funny.”  

 

He was trying to reassure her, probably but the deluge of information just made her more likely to back out of it. She steeled herself and nodded through it, repeating instructions back to him so he could be sure she was listening, like she was back in preschool. And now here she is, a plastic tray in her hands and one of the guards opening the outer door for her. It’s a complicated process, one she’s too preoccupied to follow. It takes a few minutes by itself, long enough for Rey to notice the Tasers every guard has attached to their hip, and the machine guns, and the body armour. All this, for one man.

 

She hopes his parents visit him on his birthday. That’s the last thought she has before the door finally, finally opens, and she steps into the antechamber.

 

 


	2. eighteen (ii)

The first thing she notices about the cell — the head janitor was right, that is some _very_ thick glass separating it from the antechamber — is that it’s white.

 

As in, 100% white. Whiter than the Oscars. Not a single splash of colour on the white walls, the white floor, the white ceiling. The sparse furniture (bed, chair, desk, some kind of rudimentary cabinet thing) is a mix of transparent plastic and more white, so there’s none there, either. The white is so all-encompassing, and the lights so bright, that Rey squints reflexively, brings a hand up to her face to offset the glare.

 

This is all to say, of course, that anybody in this room who wasn’t all-white all over would stick out like a sore thumb, and the man sat on the bed in the corner has black hair. Midnight black, so dark it’s not washed out by the white of everything around it, which is some feat. He has his face turned away from her, but his hands and forearms are pale where they’re not studded with moles or dark hair, like the room has leached all the colour out of them over the years. It’s been — what, a decade, now, that he’s been in here? Rey counts backwards in her head, works out that yes, it’s been ten years, and then Ben Solo is turning around and getting up, and.

 

 _Shit_ , he’s big.

 

That’s a strange thought to have, and she really should’ve noticed it before now, but the angle he was sitting at hid the breadth of his shoulders, and he wasn’t standing up, obviously, so she couldn’t see how tall he is (miles taller than her, head almost brushing the ceiling, and really, they should have made the cell bigger, but maybe that was the point, or maybe nobody knew he was going to grow that much). So she’s unprepared for the sheer _size_ of Ben Solo. He looks like a rock formation, like another piece of furniture, like something that does not belong in this tiny room with its white, white walls.

 

He also looks — scared, for just the briefest of moments, before his eyebrows pull together and he takes a few steps towards the glass. His voice, when it comes, is deep and hoarse, like he’s just woken up. Which he must have done, she realises belatedly. She’s got his breakfast in her hands. Or, rather: he hasn’t spoken to anybody in the time since he woke up, however long ago that was. Maybe not for a while, actually.

 

“You’re not Elena.”

 

 _Oh, he does speak to the staff_ , Rey thinks, and then realises she’s meant to reply. Or — not meant to, exactly, from what the head janitor said. She can ignore him, if she wants to. Drop the tray in the out-slot, receive the empty one in the in-slot, pass out of the antechamber and into her actual job. But — common courtesy is a powerful thing, the weight of societal expectation always heavier than you expect, and Rey’s curious, despite herself. And besides, she’s never been great at impulse control.

 

“My name’s Rey,” she says, setting the breakfast tray down on the platform on her side of the out-slot. “Elena’s — off sick, I think? She only called in about ten minutes ago, I sort of got roped in last minute. It’s my first day,” she adds, inanely, but Ben Solo’s expression hasn’t changed, so she doubts he gives a toss exactly how long she’s been working at the facility. He makes a noncommittal kind of grunt, confirming her suspicions, and moves over to the table to pick up an empty tray, identical to the one in her hands, except for the lack of food on it. The one from last night. It seems a bit unfair to make him keep the dirty silverware (plasticware, that is) all night, but then again, all of this is unfair.

 

She watches how he moves, for no reason beyond sheer boredom, and sees how his gait is heavy, ambling. As you’d expect from somebody his size. Once, when she and Rose and Finn and Poe were stupid-drunk and giggling in the popped trunk of Poe’s orange Subaru, the conversation had somehow got onto _His Dark Materials_ , and what daemons they’d all have, if they lived in Lyra’s world. The others had decided on a magpie, for Rey: _‘cause you’re always darting around looking for treasure_ , Finn had pronounced solemnly. She’d been the only one everybody could agree on, and she’d felt — odd, about that. It wasn’t that a magpie didn’t fit her — she thinks it does; more than any other animal, at least — but that she was reminded, suddenly, of the fact that she had a personality that other people saw, and that might not necessarily reflect what _she_ thought she was like.

 

Anyway, if Ben Solo had a daemon it would be a bear: slow, ponderous, harmless-looking (but for those _hands_ ) and yet capable of great violence. He ambles over to the table, collects his old tray and brings it to the platform on his side, slotting it into place with careless ease. Right. Ten years going through the same motions every day will do that to you. Rey’s not so slick, hands fumbling at the controls. There is never a point where both slots are open — both trays move into a no-man’s land before they end up on the opposite sides — but she imagines it anyway, his huge broad hand slipping through the letterbox-sized gap and reaching for her. It’s only instinct, a lifetime of close shaves expressing itself in a fleeting thought, but she feels bad about it all the same. There’s not been an incident since The Incident, ten years ago, not that she’s heard of, anyway, and Jakku surely would have been the first town to know, perched as it so precariously next to the facility. On the edge of the volcano, she’s heard some folk describe it as. 

 

“You have to pull the lever again.” Rey starts, and looks up to meet Ben Solo’s eyes for the first time. They’re a strange colour, not quite brown and not quite amber, sunken into his face like he’s recently been reanimated. This close, she can see the purple bruise-like shadows that gather in the hollows beneath his eyes. How do the lights work? Does it turn off at a set time? Do they ever use the lights to control him, when he —

 

He’s tapping on the glass, at the lever she just jerked a few seconds ago, like she’s somehow forgotten where it is already. She pulls it, and the two trays spin into opposite sides of the machine, leaving her with an empty plate and bowl and him with breakfast. He doesn’t snatch it, like she expects (why does she expect this? More pertinently: why does she keep making assumptions about a man she barely knows anything about?), but pauses once he’s reached for it, the tray comically small in his hands, like a child’s plaything. She has to check the empty tray in her hands to make sure they’re not actually smaller than they should be, but no, it looks normal-sized. It’s him that’s out of all proportion. Like something from another world.  A mismatch. A changeling. A changeling who’s looking at her again, and biting at his bottom lip, like — well, if she didn’t know any better, she’d say like a nervous teenager, for all he’s four years older than her.

 

“Rey,” he says, after maybe five more seconds of lip-biting. “Is that with an ‘a’, or?”

 

“With an ‘e’,” Rey says, something in her relaxing once she realises what he’s getting at. She’s been fielding versions of this question all her life; this, at least, she knows. He lets his bottom lip fall out of his mouth, straightening his shoulders, and — this she doesn’t know. She’s finding it supremely difficult to read his face — she can pick up on the micro-expressions that move across it like wind over long grass, but not on what they mean. Does he know what she’s thinking? That’s what the news reports and New Yorker articles she’s come across online all indicated, to varying degrees, but — she doesn’t know. She expected mind-readers to look different, somehow. More smug. Less sad.

 

He nods, curiosity sated, and turns away from her, and she takes that as her cue to leave.

 

She thinks about Ben Solo as she bikes home in the gathering dusk, after a day doing her actual job. Or her actual second job, that is. She’s on the late shift at Maz’s tonight, so she can afford to be a little meandering; doesn’t take the fastest route, but goes for the prettiest, the one that loops around the river and lets her approach her apartment from the nicer-looking side of town. Her thoughts are not particularly coherent: just snatches of things, the black of his hair like a splash of paint against the white of the cell, the rumbling timbre of his voice, the look in his deep-dark eyes. And then she thinks clearly, suddenly, of the way in which what he did was described by the papers and the TV anchors and the radio people. How they called him a monster. A crime against nature. Something to be put down. Buried in the desert. Forgotten about.

 

*

 

Rey keeps working in the facility, because she needs a second job and they pay well, despite being the town’s main source of employment. (She wonders, sometimes, where they get the money; what branch of the government deals with keeping Ben Solo under lock and key? Defence? Police? She knows his mother is some kind of politician: is there a conflict of interest, there? Did they make her vote on her own son’s life?)

 

Elena’s illness isn’t life-threatening, it turns out, because Rey isn’t called upon to deliver Ben Solo’s breakfast again, or any other meal. She works on the janitorial team instead, mopping floors and cleaning the offices on the western edge of the facility, facing out towards the mountains. She doesn’t get much of a chance to look at them, absorbed as she is by scrubbing the floors until they shine, but they’re there, all the same. Just like Ben Solo’s there, even if she can’t see him. The thought, far from terrifying her, as her friends think it should, is strangely comforting.

 

“What do you mean, comforting?” says Poe, squinting at her with mock-suspicion. They’re at Maz’s, as usual; Rey just finished her shift, right on time for Poe’s leaving thing. It’s not anything formal, but they’re hanging out together as a foursome for the last time before he goes, so it feels momentous. Finn and Rose aren’t going anywhere -- Finn’s going to community college, and Rose already has a job at the power plant -- but it’s still going to be weird, not having Poe Dameron’s winning smile around the place. There was a moment, just now, when Rey was hanging up her apron in the back and looking towards their regular booth, that he looked almost like somebody else. And then she blinked, and it was gone. Just like Poe will be, soon.

 

“I mean comforting,” Rey says, already regretting saying it. She lets her guard down a lot more around people these days, but the problem with that is sometimes people call you out on things you’ve said and then you have to explain them. Having a semi-normal social life is _exhausting_. “It’s just, like. I don’t know. It’s nice knowing there’s one thing that never changes in that place.” She pulls a face.

 

“Which you’re thinking sounds kind of douchey now you’ve said it,” Finn guesses, and she bumps his shoulder appreciatively. He’s always been good at knowing what she’s trying to say when she’s failing to say it, since the day they met. “But, like. I don’t think you should worry too much about sounding douchey. I mean, the guy killed —”

 

“Alright,” Poe says quickly, before Finn can go any further. Probably he’s seen the look on Rey’s face as she stirs her chocolate milkshake with her paper straw (Maz is very up on environmental issues). “We know what he did, buddy.”

 

“Along with everybody else in the country,” Rose adds. Finn’s eyes are on the tabletop. Well and truly chastised. She bumps him again to let him know it’s okay, she’s not offended or anything. Although what right she would have to be offended, she’s no idea.

 

“What was he like, though?” Rose goes on, and Rey looks at her from Finn to find a strange mix of fear and curiosity in her eyes. That’s the usual expression, when somebody finds out that she’s met the monster and lived to tell the tale.

 

(She feels guilty just for thinking that, even though they’re people in town’s words, not hers. He was nothing but gentle, in their brief time in the same space, for all he was disgruntled at having to get up.)

 

“Just. You know. A person.”

 

“I mean, he’s not, though,” Finn pipes up again, and Rey regrets wordlessly reassuring him that she was okay with this line of conversation. “He’s got that, you know.” He wiggles his fingers in front of him and then mimes explosions going off.

 

“He gets manicures and things explode?” Rey asks, smiling despite herself, and Finn snorts and shoves her playfully.

 

“No, peanut. You know what I mean.”

 

“They don’t even have a name for it, do they?” That’s Poe again, musing. That’s why he’s going to go to college on the east coast: he _thinks_ about things. And also his mum left him a lot of money. You’d never think to look at Poe, Rey sometimes thinks, that he lost his mum that young. Then again, people apparently don’t notice the bad things that’ve happened to her, either, so. “What he has.”

 

“It’s not, like, a condition, though,” Rose points out. “It’s not a disease. Or if it is, it’s a disease that doesn’t have any adverse effects.”

 

“You could see the powers as an adverse effect,” Finn points out. “Haven’t brought him much joy, have they? Although then I guess you get into the whole question of whether what happened was his fault or not.”

 

“It was in the eyes of the law,” Rey says, softer than usual. “Just.”

 

“Eleven’s when defence of infancy stops applying, right?” Finn wants to be a lawyer, once he gets enough credits at their local community college to transfer to state. “And he was twelve.”

 

“For federal crimes.” Rey looked this up last night, in an idle moment in between getting home and having a shower. “But in some states you can be charged from babyhood, basically.” The majority of the country, actually, including their corner of it. Sometimes she wonders about what would’ve happened if Ben Solo had been born in a different place; Sweden, for example, where defence of infancy stops at fifteen. He wouldn’t have had black hair, she thinks, nonsensically. White Swedes all seem to be blond and blue-eyed, from those scandinoir shows Finn's weirdly into. 

 

“— three-year-olds with guns,” Poe’s saying, shaking his head. “We really gotta come to some kind of compromise on gun laws.”

 

“Try telling that to the folk who want to protect themselves from the big guy,” Rose says, jerking a thumb in the direction of the holding facility. Rey can only remember living in this place, but she knows from talking to out-of-towners at the diner that it’s only a gesture people from the area make. Like they can’t bear to even say the name of the man in the facility.

 

“It’s not like he’s going to get out,” she says, irritation creeping into her tone. “They’ve got twenty full-time security staff, just for him.”

 

“I know, Rey,” Rose says, leaning across Poe to put a placatory hand on her shoulder. “I’m only saying what people think.”

 

“Excuse me,” says Poe, clamping his straight arms around Rose’s forearm like a crocodile’s jaws. “Is this a leaving party for Ben Solo, or for me?” And then the conversation turns to everything they’re going to miss about Poe, obviously, and Rey doesn’t even think about how Ben Solo doesn’t have any friends to miss when they go to college on the other side of the country. Not even once.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> updates are p slow as you may have noticed, but we're chugging along. big thanks to commenters and kudos-ers and bookmarkers!


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